Angie signed me in and handed me a visitor badge, then unlocked a steel door that led to a glass-walled hallway, flanked on one side by the garden courtyard and on the other by a series of specialized labs: DNA. Firearms. Toxicology. Chemistry. Latent Prints. Photography. Documents. Computer Forensics. The chemistry lab had large windows along the hallway—“the aquarium,” Angie called it, and the chemist swimming behind the glass looked mildly annoyed by my presence. Then he saw I was with Angie, and his frown gave way to a smile and a nod.
The crime lab occupied the entire second floor of the square. Halfway around, at the corner where the laboratory square joined the complex’s central square—administration and agents’ offices, according to Angie—was the facility’s main entrance, which opened into an area that was half lobby, half museum. The walls were lined with plaques and displays, including several glass cabinets highlighting the case of serial killer Ted Bundy, who was caught and eventually executed after a 1978 rampage in Tallahassee. In addition to photos of Bundy and the Florida State University sorority where he killed two young women and seriously injured two others, the display cases included plaster casts of Bundy’s teeth, which helped convict him of the FSU murders: during his assault on one of the victims, he bit her left buttock, and the distinctive bite mark was used as evidence at his trial. “Maybe it’s just because I know what he did,” I remarked to Angie, “but even his teeth look sinister. Almost vampirelike.”
“I totally see that,” she agreed. “I guess it’s good he didn’t have braces as a kid. Might’ve been harder to get a conviction.”
The display was a sobering reminder of the high stakes involved in forensic investigations. If Bundy had been caught and convicted after his first murder, dozens of young women—more than thirty by Bundy’s own admission, and as many as one hundred according to some estimates—would have escaped terrible fates. “Okay,” I said, “let’s hope the skull you want me to look at isn’t the work of a serial killer.”
“Amen to that,” she agreed grimly. “Speaking of the skull . . .” She led me along one more stretch of hall, which closed the square and brought us back to where we’d begun, at the southeastern corner of the complex. “Hang on just a second.” She signed herself into the evidence room and emerged, moments later, holding a jawless skull in gloved hands. “I told the medical examiner you were going to be here, and he sent this over. I think he was glad to hand it off to a bone guy.” She nodded at a steel door just across from the evidence room. “You mind getting that for me?” I opened it, and she led me into a simply furnished room that was a combination office and lab; a computer workstation occupied the interior wall, a countertop lined the windowed wall, and a large table filled the center. The room was well lit and was even better cooled; the windows were dewy with condensation from the chill.
“Wow, no danger of getting heatstroke in here.”
“The lab is always cold. Other parts of the place are always too hot. Go figure.” She shrugged. “The thermostat’s in another building, downtown. Miles away.” She checked her watch. “The case agent assigned to this should have been here by now. Stu—Stuart Vickery. Great agent, but bad with a watch. If he offers to take you to the airport this evening, say no—you’ll miss your flight for sure. But we can go ahead and get started, and catch him up when he gets here.” She set the skull on the table, resting it on a beanbag cushion to protect and stabilize it. She pointed to a big box of blue gloves on the counter. “You want gloves?”
I did want gloves. The skull had been given a cursory cleaning by time and, presumably, the M.E.’s office, but it remained slightly greasy, and despite the rapid whoosh of the cooling system, the aroma of decomposition was already noticeable.
I took a pair of gloves from the box and tugged them on. “I wear gloves a lot more often than I used to. Back in my younger days, I didn’t glove up if I was handling clean, dry bones. Now I’ve gotten a lot more careful. A couple months ago I had a case where a woman died from a contaminated bone transplant. She got toxic shock syndrome from a bacterium called Clostridium sordellii. It’s pretty common in soil, and generally harmless, but it got into her body and started multiplying like crazy. By the time they realized how sick she was, she was a goner.”
“They tried antibiotics?”
“Yeah, something powerful—like, the H-bomb of antibiotics. The antibiotics killed the bacteria, but by then the bacteria had produced lethal levels of toxins. Nasty stuff. A bad way to die.” I shuddered at the memory. “Hell, it’s made me kinda skittish about working in the yard. Get a cut or a scrape, a germ like that gets in, and if the conditions are just right—or just wrong—you’re done for.”